LG Optimus 7 GW910 Preview

With Apple and Android continuing their march to worldwide domination in the smartphone segment, other players like Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian are constantly losing market share to these new giants. 4 years back, Google and Apple were almost unheard of in the mobile segment, and now, they have disrupted the entire mobile industry and totally changed the status quo.

Many other major manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola are now backing Android and Apple still uses its proprietary software-hardware combination that has worked for it all these years.

Nokia is still trying to make Symbian work and will soon launch Symbian ^3 and MeeGo phones, while RIM has completely revamped the BlackBerry OS to version 6.0 which is touch friendly. Microsoft has finally dumped Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 and has moved on to a new OS - Windows Phone 7 which was created fully from scratch and has a better chance to beat Android and iOS than the previous iterations.

At least 10 new Windows Phone 7 devices have been leaked already, including the HTC Schubert, LG E900 and others. The LG Optimus 7 GW910 is another such device, which will run Windows Phone 7. It has a stylish design with a 3.5 inch touchscreen display and a QWERTY keyboard.

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Design

The LG Optimus 7 GW910 is a very stylish QWERTY slider. It will have a 3.5 inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The glossy black design looks quite cool and the four row QWERTY keyboard looks quite comfortable to use. Below the display, there is the ubiquitous Windows key, and the Back and Search keys.

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Hardware and OS

Microsoft partners seem to have taken a cue from Android and Apple, and are packing all the Windows Phone 7 phones with really powerful hardware. The LG Optimus 7 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor clocked at 1 GHz and comes with 512 MB RAM. It will run the Windows Phone 7 OS with the stock UI. No details about the internal storage are out but it will support up to 32 GB microSD cards.

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Multimedia

Windows Mobile phones really sucked when it came to multimedia, but the LG Optimus 7 with Windows Phone 7 comes with a 5 MP camera which can capture images at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. It comes with autofocus and LED flash and features like face and smile detection.

It can playback MP4, DivX, WMV and H.264 encoded videos. Audio support is limited to MP3, WAV, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA.

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Connectivity

I don't know why I even bother to include this section these days. Every new smartphone offers all the basic connectivity features like GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0, including the LG Optimus 7. It will sport the latest version of Internet Explorer Mobile. It also has a GPS transceiver with A-GPS support.

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Conclusion

The LG Optimus 7 GW910 is a very capable phone, hardware wise. What remains to be seen is if Windows Phone 7 can beat Android and iOS, or at least carve out a big enough niche for itself among enterprise users to be profitable.